Synopses & Reviews
Dog Years is set in three parts. Herr Brauxel, the owner of a mine, tells the Morning Shifts, an account of the early years of the two main figures, the half-Jew, Eduard Amsel, and his friend and blood brother, Waltern Matern. The river Vistula, with its cargo of history, runs through their exploits. So does the dog Senta, who will whelp Harras, who in turn will sire the black shepherd, Prinz, the Fuhrer's favorite dog.
The second narrator, Harry Liebenau, tells part two, Love Letters, addressed to his cousin Tulla. From the vantage point of Danzig, he takes the reader into the prewar years and beyond. Amsel, a gifted and precocious creator of scarecrows made in the image of man, starts to build lifelike, mechanically marching SA-men, and it is Matern, his blood brother, himself an SA-man, who calls him sheeny and knocks out his teeth. The Dog Years are now in full swing; they lead right into the war, up to the moment when Prinz finally deserts his master, because even a dog can have enough.
The threads of the first two narrators axe taken up by Waltern Matern in the Materniads. Matern records the progress of his tour of revenge through postwar Germany. Accompanied by Prinz, he searches for the perpetrators of Nazi misdeeds and his lost blood brother, Amsel. Matern is innocent, an antifascist; it is the others who are guilty, even if the rising tide of prosperity seems to wash all of them clean. Fitfully administering a highly original -- if for him somewhat debilitating -- revenge, Matern ends up as a visitor in Herr Brauxel's mine, to find it peopled by an underground host of mechanical scarecrows in riotous preparation for their release aboveground.
This is the firstmajor novel that followed Grass's celebrated Tin Drum, exhibiting all the brilliance, inventiveness, and narrative daring of its predecessor. Beginning in the nineteen twenties and ending in the fifties, it is a splendid evocation of an apocalyptic period and its startling aftermath.
Review
"Günter Grass is the greatest living novelist today." -John Irving
"I don't think I have read any other post-war novel in which this diligent sense of life's interrelatedness and unity has been set down in such iron sentences or, through patient assembly of the fruits of exact examination made so stark...The book is a work of genius." --The Nation
Synopsis
A novel set in three parts, beginning in the 1920s and ending in the 1950s, that follows the lives of two friends from the prewar years in Germany through an apocalyptic period and its startling aftermath. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Synopsis
Set in three parts, this novel moves from the 1920s to the 1950s, following the lives of Eduard Amsel, his blood brother Walter Matern, and Prinz, the black shepherd who is also the Führer's favorite dog. Amsel builds lifelike, mechanically marching SA men, Matern practices a strange revenge on Nazi criminals, and Prinz deserts his master because even a dog can have enough. Exhibiting all the brilliance, inventiveness and narrative daring that Grass is famous for, this is a splendid evocation of an apocalyptic period and its startling aftermath.
About the Author
G�NTER GRASS was born in Danzig, Germany, in 1927. He is the widely acclaimed author of numerous books, including The Tin Drum, My Century, Crabwalk, and Peeling the Onion. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999.